Name: The Reason Why Roger Waters is So Outspoken
Uploaded: 2022-10-06T17:18:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Reason Why Roger Waters is So Outspoken' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Reason Why Roger Waters is So Outspoken' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-06. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Out of all the people that perform music and travel and are as prominent as you
are,
you're probably one of the most outspoken and informed when it comes to issues
on foreign policy and human rights.
When did this become a big part of your life and when did discussing this
publicly become a big part of your life?
Well, it became a big part of my life.
The day my father died, I think.
I mean, I wouldn't know because I was only five months old.
My father, as you might or may not know, died at Anzio on the 18th of February,
1944.
And I was born September 43.
So I was only a few months old.
But when I started to understand some of this was when he didn't come home and
start picking me up from school when I was a little kid.
And then all through my childhood, I was brought up by my mother, my brother,
and my big brother, John, and I were brought up single-handed by my mom, who
was a school teacher.
But she was also very left-wing.
She's an interesting woman because she came from a very kind of middle-class
family in London.
Funnily enough, they lived in Golders Green, which was sort of well-known for
being a Jewish community in North London.
Her father ran a business that was sort of middleman in fancy goods, toys, and
things like that.
So there was a big warehouse in London.
But my mother, and she went off to a boarding school, girls' school.
So she was very brought up in a very fairly straight-laced English, Christian,
middle-class way.
She then trained as a teacher.
And her first teacher training was in a town called Bradford, which is in the
north of London.
And not north of London, north of England, far north of England, in Yorkshire.
And it was a huge eye-opener to her.
There she was.
First winter comes along.
It's really cold.
There's a foot of snow on the floor.
And she suddenly notices that half the kids in her class are walking to school
with no shoes.
And something went, bing!
This would have been in 1935, 36, something like that.
And she suddenly went, what?
And she started to look into social conditions there in the industrial north.
And even then, in the mid to late 30s, she understood that there were
inequalities in the context of the society that she lived in that she felt a
personal need to do something about.
And she became extremely left-wing.
Anyway, cut to later on.
So our front room was always a Labour Party committee room.
And she was always off in the evenings canvassing elections and dragging me and
my brother to British-China Friendship Association meetings in the evening.
But she was always very careful and clear with us that she would.
I remember one day she said to me and my brother, when we'd come back from a
meeting, interestingly enough, at the Friends Meeting House, which is the place
the Quakers meet, you know, wherever it is in the world.
It's always called the Friends Meeting House.
And we'd been watching films of K-pop-clad Chinese, you know, soldiers fighting
against Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist puppet government and blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she said, you know where we've been tonight, don't you, Roger?
And I said, no.
And she said, we've been at the Friends Meeting House.
That is where the Quakers meet.
She said, well, as you know, I'm an atheist, so I can't subscribe to their
religious beliefs, but I will say this.
They are very, very good people.
That's stuck with, I can still recount that story now because it's so important.
You don't have to subscribe to people's beliefs.
You can, I can be a radical atheist and you can be a Hindu.
The important thing is that we're good people, that we have hearts and that we
care about our brothers and sisters.
And my mum did.
I'm going to tell you one more mum story and then I'll stop about mum because
this is the most important bit.
I was 13 years old.
I had just gone through a phase where I suddenly realized I was going to die.
I don't know if all adolescents have this existential crisis in their young, in
early puberty.
But I did.
And I thought, F me.
I'm going to die.
This is scary as shit.
You know.
Oh, my God.
And I was, it might have been that or it might have been something else.
But anyway, something was worrying me.
And it was probably more some kind of political thing that I'd latched onto,
maybe through her.
And she's, and she's looked at me and she said, all right, I'm going to give
you some advice now.
Come on then, mum.
All through your life, you're going to be faced with difficult questions and
you're going to have to figure things out.
This is my advice.
When anything crops up, so it could be Israel Powell's time.
It could be anything.
It doesn't matter what it is.
You must read, read, read, read, read.
That's what Smokonish was telling me.
He hadn't.
He'd only read one side.
That's the difference between Michael Smokonish and me.
I've tried to look at all sides of these things.
So I'd know a bit more what I'm talking about.
Anyway, she said, read, read, read.
And, very important, learn everything you can about the subject that's
troubling you.
And, importantly, look at it from both sides.
If there's another opinion, make sure you study that as well and blah, blah,
blah.
It'll take some time.
It'll be hard work.
But when you've done that, the work is over.
You have done all the heavy lifting.
The rest of it is easy.
And I went, uh, what is the rest of it, mum?
And she looked at me and she said, the rest of it, well, that's simple.
You do the right thing.